“Time Flies and Life’s Too Short”

The last week has been a weird one. We’ve muddled our way through a called election, watched as the sitting president has ignored and disputed that outcome, learned that a nest of murder hornets was vacuumed out of a tree in Washington State, and come to understand that some 40% of Americans plan to travel for Thanksgiving in the midst of an uncontrolled outbreak of COVID-19. But the kid’s in good spirits, at least! We are a fortunate household, in that both parents are present and working in largely good health, and so we’re relatively confident that our particular three-year-old, ignorant of all these historic developments, is living something that approximates a normal psychological year (at least by the standards of most three-year-olds, who are both extremely psychological and not particularly normal). Even as I have caromed around the news all week, Kina—our household’s least literate citizen—is breezy as a day at the beach.

Time flies, and life’s too short, she said at lunch yesterday, when we asked her if she wanted some noodles on her plate. I think she might have picked up on the fact that I’ve been watching my diet in an effort to reduce my cholesterol (and maybe gain some semblance of control over my life) and it’s probably clear to her that in recent days I’ve been more, shall we say, liberal with my pork intake. Kina has not been forced to forgo noodles in recent days, but it is true that life’s too short to deny oneself pasta. While the tone of this week is no less urgent, it is at least marginally less panic-inducing than some of the months this year. (As I’ve been saying this week, it’s not so much that we’re healing, and it’s likely we haven’t exactly stopped the bleeding either, but I am cautiously optimistic that we’ve reduced the stabbing around these parts.) So what do you do when life is urgent but trending slightly better? You eat what you need to. Time flies when you’re freaking out, and you have only to look around to see how short life is.

Wear your masks, eat some noodles, and look to the future.

“I Don’t Wanna See Anything of Your Armpits!”

I will say here only that our household’s most opinionated anti-nudist also had strong opinions about my nipples.

Today’s Parade is, according to its principal artist, a “Memphis-inspired” abstraction. That artist tried several times to convince our publisher to contribute something to the layout today, succeeding only after complying with Kina’s demands for a chia jelly snack. Once the jelly was consumed, our publisher got to work, finally landing on the incongruous orange rectangles near the top of the cover, which she tells us is “a book” that depicts her at play.

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